Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement.

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.

Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude.

The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method.